I've known about these stone circles above Eskdale for years but never visited. They turned out to be much better than expected and really worth a visit. They are high on a hill because in the Bronze Age because the valleys would have been thickly wooded in those days. The moor was the only sensible place to live. I was thinking of the idea of the stone circle as an astronomical observatory plotting the time of year. Maybe some of the first science ever done making the farming year understandable. If that's the case, then there should be a logic to how the stones are arranged. One oddity about each of the five circles on the moor is that each has a central marker. So I stood at the centre of the biggest circle and took a bearing to one of the most prominent stones in the outer ring, riughly south west.
A bearing of 240 degrees. If it is astronomical, being on the west side it's most likely to be sunset. But how would you know when without going? It occured to me that it must be possible to calculate the bearing for sunset at any given latitude so I checked online and found
www.suncalc.net. Here's what I found for Eskdale for roughly the shortest day of the year.
The sunset bearing is about 230 degrees measured with a protractor. Close but not touching... but the precision of both measurements is poor. The only way to test my theory would be to go for sunset on the shortest day!
